Tech Qualified

As SVP of Marketing at Alpha, a rapid consumer research platform, Tom Burg has always pushed his clients to think digitally. Now, this is even more imperative — Tom’s team aims to find the best ways to reach and interact with people virtually.

On this episode of Tech Qualified with Justin Brown, Tom Burg talks about the ways he and his team are pushing the bounds of their marketing strategies, especially given the changing spaces of human interaction.

One way he has done this is by taking advantage of their podcast, which has been streaming for four years and has an established listenership. The podcast has been a great way to attract clients. 

“If people are taking the time to listen to the podcast, generally they're going to be a pretty good fit for our business.”

They are currently working on an experimental webinar program as well, which will focus on how to navigate the world today.

This episode is produced by New North.  New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis. 

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed life for everyone. Nowhere is that more true than for the healthcare industry. So what do you do if your buyers are precisely those people, the ones on the frontlines of the crisis?

In this episode of Tech Qualified with Justin Brown, Elyse Lazartic, Senior Manager of Sales and Programs at Waystar, a company that provides RCM technology for the healthcare industry, talks about the ways she has had to shift her thought process and marketing tactics to adapt to our current reality. 

“We've had to pivot quite a bit in terms of who we're targeting and how we're messaging and what solutions of our portfolio are most urgent for those providers right now, given the situation,” Elyse says. 

Her team has had to rethink tactics to try to understand what is most useful for the market at this time, which has meant adapting the content they are producing, the format of that content, the way they get buyer attention and how they interact with them throughout the customer journey, relying a lot more on digital and virtual methods. 

“It's about deeply understanding the problems, identifying with the buyers and then taking the solutions that you have developed and aligning them really closely with what that person is trying to solve for,” Elyse says.

This episode is produced by New North.  New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis. 

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision. 

When Taylor Vossler joined technology consulting firm C3 Technology Advisors to lead marketing efforts, she wanted to pull a list of clients that had just experienced an outage with one provider and suggest that they reevaluate and create a backup plan. 

Good marketing, right? 

It would have been, but the company didn’t have the tools in place to segment a list that way. Fast forward a few months — Taylor convinced the company to implement Salesforce to better align sales and marketing. Next, she added Hubspot to improve marketing automation.

Her timing was serendipitous for a company that has relied heavily on physical events for demand generation. With face-to-face off the table for now and their largest event postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Taylor has helped the team pivot to more of an inbound strategy. 

In this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown talks with Taylor about how she’s expanding the 12-year-old firm’s marketing efforts, the challenges of positioning the firm as a trusted advisor since its service offering has changed over time, as well as how she’s able to align sales and marketing efforts.

This episode is produced by New North.  New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis. 

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision. 

Collaboration seems to be a motto to live by for Kieran Farr, and as VP of Marketing for Bitmovin, Kieran has made it his particular mission to get his team working alongside the sales team to create positive change and forward momentum. 

In this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown interviews Kieran about how that alliance was formed, being a thought leader for different target audiences and how content plays into Bitmovin’s demand generation strategies.

Over the past two years, Kieran’s marketing team has worked alongside the sales team to implement a system of unified metrics through pipeline generation. This helps both teams work toward a unified goal and improve the quality of leads.

Kieran also builds relationships with other marketing executives, so he can ask questions and share information. For him, this has been an effective way to confirm strategies, make comparisons and explore improvements. 

“It does take time. It takes effort, but it's worth it, because you learn a lot and you make great relationships as well,” he says.

This episode is produced by New North.  New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis. 

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision. 

Content production is important, but building relationships on the ground is far more crucial, according to Jeff Perkins, CMO and Head of Product at ParkMobile, an app that helps people find and pay for parking in over 400 cities across the U.S. 

“Build a peer group that you can go to and bounce ideas off of and share insights and share learning,” he says in this episode of Tech Qualified. “That will be one of the most valuable things you can have in your career.”

Jeff is a 10-year veteran of the advertising industry who now leads the marketing team at the startup, reinforcing their reputation as an industry thought leader.

At ParkMobile, Jeff nurtures crucial relationships with business partners, suppliers and municipal employees in the parking service industry while also navigating the behaviors and needs of customers. 

“It really is a fun opportunity where I'm able to work across B2B marketing and B2C marketing,” Jeff says. 

Jeff has championed his company’s role as an industry thought leader, particularly through the production of meaningful content. At both his previous and current job, he has found that providing information through webinars, newsletters and trade show events helps bring in new clients and partners and reinforces relationships.

This episode is produced by New North.  New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis. 

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision. 

When Steve Pollak describes his marketing philosophy, he uses a baseball analogy. 

“You can't hit a home run from the dugout,” says Steve who is the Director of Marketing and Design Services at Banyan Hill Technologies, a firm specializing in the Internet of Things (IoT) for a range of industries. 

As a result, Steve spends a lot of time in the top and middle of the sales funnel, focusing on increasing brand awareness so that when prospects are ready to execute a project they go with Banyan instead of other companies.

In this episode of Tech Qualified, Steve, who started his career as a newspaper journalist before making his way into SEO and marketing, details how he juggles marketing priorities across brand awareness, lead generation, and customer retention. 

Plus, he discusses how the lengthy customer journey — which is at least six months long — affects marketing. “You're really getting married to the person when you sign up with Internet of Things software — this is pretty big enterprise relationship,” he says. 

This episode is produced by New North.  New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis. 

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision. 

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown interview Jaimie Anzelone, the Director of Marketing Communications at Sitehands. This interview focuses on how she helped build the marketing infrastructure for a startup that spun out of another 25-year old company. Jaimie talks about the challenges posed by the pandemic and how the organization communicates with their technical community and customer community.

• Jaimie starts the interview by providing some insight into her marketing career and she mentions how she got her first exposure by writing about FinTech. Jaimie started a blog called FunTech to explore a lot of the new companies offering payment functionality (i.e., Venmo).
• Jaimie mentions how she sees different companies emerging every day, and that's what attracted her to the IT services space.
• Jaimie talks about the company's ideal customer profile, which would be any large enterprise company that needs IT field services.
• The company provides the technicians at the customer locations, to help, support, maintain, upgrade the different technologies that they have in their organization.
• She talks about how the company is dealing with the current pandemic situation and coping with the new environment of remote working.
• To pivot and support their clients, they are working from their client's conference room and setting up remote working stations.
• Sitehands has big fortune 500 companies, even some smaller, medium-sized businesses as their clients. A lot of initial clients, who were very large enterprises, stemmed from relationships that existed with the original IT company.
• Sitehands is a provider community, and their technicians are going out in the field and implementing and delivering the work. 
• She talks about the company's efforts to make sure that their technician community feels secure and knows that there is still work for them...but it’s just a different environment.
• She also discusses how the Coronavirus pandemic has impacted businesses and mentioned how many organizations are trying to figure out how to keep their business running while still complying with company standards, security, and regulations.
• She talks about her concerns regarding remote working and its proper implementation, which is impossible without appropriate collaborative tools and the right setup.
• In current times, communication is quite different, and the channels which are brought into use are changing, and communication has become more personalized.
• Sitehands offers a great platform that allows their clients to see the work being done in real-time, which is often a big differentiator from other IT service providers.
• The company had no brand presence on social media platforms until Jaimie came onboard.
• In the past two years,

This episode is produced by New North.  New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis. 

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision. 

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown and Tristan Pelligrino chat with Josh Blanton, VP of marketing at Corevist. This interview takes a deeper look into Josh’s past experience as a marketing consultant- where he worked with both startups and larger organizations like Cisco. Josh highlights some of the key demand generation activities at Corevist and discusses how the company competes with larger organizations by focusing on organic content for the enterprise.

• Josh starts the conversation by sharing some insight into his background and how he enjoys the faster paced environment of a startup.
• Josh introduces the audience to Corevist, which is a B2B commerce platform that directly integrates with a company’s ERP system - most notably SAP.
• The company is helping its large enterprise clients move to online commerce and avoid archaic situations with fax orders, phone orders, etc.
• Josh breaks down the company’s lead generation efforts which mostly stem from the development of organic content and paid ads (to organic content).
• Corevist does not have BDRs or SDRs in place to sell to the enterprises - nearly 95% of leads come from inbound marketing efforts.
• Josh breaks down the approach he took when arriving at Corevist, which was to initially identify what’s working and validate using real data.
• At many tech companies, there are large investors in place and there’s access to a wide range of resources - at Corevist, Josh had to build something scalable without these types of resources.
• A combination of SEO tools and techniques are used to drive Corevist’s organic traffic strategy - tools such as ahrefs are important to detecting what enterprise level prospects are searching for.
• Identifying keywords and long-tail keywords with the right search intent have become an important part of the organic content strategy.
• Generally, over the life cycle of a normal sales cycle, the company gets anywhere between 100 to 200 different clicks on thought leadership content through different channels.
• Josh heavily relies on SEO and Backlinko for B2B marketing.

• Corevist has built its lead generation efforts mostly on organic content - “95% of new business comes through, organic, which is a bit unusual.”
• During a long sales cycle, Josh mentions that the company often sees between 100 - 200 clicks on thought leadership content.
• Josh is an avid reader and recently he and his team read the Challenger Sale. After reading he concluded that it's less sometimes about the pro

This episode is produced by New North.  New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis. 

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision. 

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Emily Negrin Director of Global Communication and Marketing at GEOSYS. This interview focuses on Emily’s past work experience and how she transitioned from the B2B side of the food business to the agricultural world. Emily takes a deeper dive into how she helped implement marketing strategies for a 30-year old company battling a number of new agtech startups.

• Emily starts the interview by providing some insight into her past experiences prior to joining GEOSYS - she started her career with the consumer side of public relations and worked with several agencies in the Minneapolis area.  
• She decided to change her career from the B2B side of the food business into the world of agriculture and “Agtech.”
• Emily mentions how she worked for a few years at Land O’Lakes - in their wind field business and was introduced to GEOSYS from that experience. 
• GEOSYS is actually an older company with over thirty years of experience in the agricultural technology industry. 
• The company uses satellite imagery to monitor how crops are growing across the globe and this data is used for all of the businesses “around a farmer” which include insurance companies, bankers, commodity traders and more.
• Emily came on board at GEOSYS about four years ago and helped them start their marketing and communications efforts.
• GEOSYS found that a variety of Silicon Valley startups surfaced within agtech and a stronger focus on marketing and communications became inevitable in order to differentiate the company from new players.
• Emily talks about the difference between agency work and being on the corporate side of marketing and communications.
• GEOSYS doesn’t sell anything directly to farmers and is focused on being a trusted advisor to those who are working directly with farmers.
• Emily talks through an earlier initiative, which was helping business people understand the market so they could ask better questions and make better decisions themselves - it wasn’t about promoting anything around GEOSYS.
• Emily describes the overarching custom journey which is very long and requires a lot of information along the way.
• GEOSYS has several different levels of service, some solutions are completely custom and involve a lengthy implementation process.
• The company uses social heavily to distribute content and educate the market around the types of services it provides to farmers and the entire community.
• GEOSYS believes that partnership efforts and open and honest communications within the team and regular communications are important for company growth.
• She talks about how they are using content in the form of blog posts and interactive presentations (produced using

This episode is produced by New North.  New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis. 

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision. 

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with  Mae Cichelli, Senior Marketing Manager at Bluedot. This interview focuses on Mae’s past work experience and how she transitioned between B2C and B2B in the retail and sports industries. Mae talks about how the company transitioned into ABM and what was involved when the team decided to get more focused with targeting.

• Mae starts the conversation by sharing her past work experience with both B2C and B2B technology companies.
• She talks about her experience in the sports industry where she sold software to sports teams.
• After selling software to sports teams, Mae worked as a Marketing Director for the University of San Francisco and helped them with selling tickets online, implementing mobile ticketing, building an app, launching an app...and really just taking care of season tickets holders.
• Mae talks about Bluedot’s ideal customers, which include tolling companies and enterprise companies who can take advantage of a customer’s location (mobile ordering with retail or restaurants, etc.).
• Instead of getting cash out, Bluedot helps their customers “unlock the power of place” and use location data to enhance experiences for their customers.
• She talks about how working with enterprise clients requires a lot of specific needs, which drove Bluedot into more of an ABM strategy. 
• Mae talks about some of the challenges with website traffic that’s not targeted - this led to leads that weren’t really qualified and contributed to a lot of “noise” with their marketing.
• After analyzing the leads and realizing that a lot of traffic was noise, the team decided to analyze the types of traffic that they wanted - and really honed in on their SEO strategy.
• The company makes strong use of introductions made by investors and this process has really helped get their organization to the next level.
• Bluedot is very thoughtful about content and strives to be just very deeply embedded in the industry. 
• She loves launching different kinds of campaigns, with different types of content formats, to strike up engagement with prospects.
• Bluedot strives to have a fair mix of new top of funnel content, which is educational.
• She explains that once a prospect has downloaded their demo app, they send them an unexpectedly delightful message - this helps to delight a prospect right away.
• Mae talks about some of the resources she finds helpful - one of them being the local Marketo events and webinars which helps in developing more complex campaigns. 

• Bluedot is a geofencing software for apps and their

This episode is produced by New North.  New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis. 

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.